Quick hit: Top Girl, Rock Bottom

I’ve played some pretty terrible video games, but this sounds like it may be a candidate for the worst game ever:

And that’s when it hits me, the one brilliant thing about this game: there is something in it for everyone. Everyone who plays it would find something in it that they hate.

Feminists would hate it. “Men’s Rights Activists” would hate it. Parents already hate it. Left-wingers would hate the consumerism and the objectification of women; right-wingers would hate the sexualization of young girls. Economists, as I’ve said above, would be baffled. Grammar enthusiasts would be appalled at its many punctuation and spelling errors. Models would hate that it makes modeling look easier and less cutthroat than it is. Fashion designers and artists would hate it for all the mismatched, misguided styling choices. My father would hate this game and Caryl Churchill would hate this game. Israelis and Palestinians would hate this game. We would all be united by our hatred of this, the most useless, uninteresting, universally offensive game known to humanity.

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About terriko

Terri has a PhD in horribleness, assuming we can all agree that web security is kind of horrible. She stopped working on skynet (err, automated program repair and AI) before robots from the future came to kill her and got a job in open source, which at least sounds safer. Now, she gets paid to break things and tell people they're wrong, and maybe help fix things so that people won't agree so readily with the first sentence of this bio in the future.
Terri writes/tweets under the name terriko, enjoys making things and mentoring others and has a plain ol' home page at http://terri.toybox.ca.

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2 thoughts on “Quick hit: Top Girl, Rock Bottom”

My gods. I do believe they’ve managed to create something which is inherently less interesting than housework. Let’s face it, housework is pretty damn pointless – you clean, you tidy, you do it all over again tomorrow because in order to live you have to make a mess – but at least there’s a purpose to it (at the end you get clean clothes, clean plates and cutlery, and a tidy living space; fun for the whole family).

Of course, this is making me wonder about how I’m defining “interesting”, given I’m a fan of the RPG genre (and more particularly of Squeenix’s “Final Fantasy” series, all of which tend to have a core gameplay loop which basically consists of “walk until attacked by Random Monster, fiddle with menu based options until monster defeated, read through the ooh shiny! screens to find out the loot you got, and return to start of loop”). Then again, if I stop and think about it, I know where I get my enjoyment – I get it from collecting information about the monsters, finding all the widgets, collecting all the plot coupons (to mail away for Exciting Prizes!) and completing all the weird little side quests. I play games with a ream of paper and a pencil within reach, making lists and creating tables, filling in blanks and following the story. I’m a stats geek at heart, and that means I will tend to play games for the completist joy of them (which makes me wonder: if the dishes came with a list of stats and characteristics, would I be keener on washing up?).

So if I ever wound up trying out Top Girl, it would probably be for the whole “gotta get ’em all” fun of Owning All The Clothes, Dating All The Guys and so forth, and I’d have a notebook chock full of stats and notes about the various things by the end of it… or at least by the point where the core gameplay loop bored me enough to drop the silly thing. Because that’s the other thing about me and games – I’ve played a lot of them. I’ve finished… about half a dozen, and of that half-dozen, at least two are the types of games where the main storyline is Just The Beginning, and therefore fairly incidental to the whole process.

I want to meet the developers. First, because obviously ,they would benefit from meeting an actual girl. (I think it’s pretty clear, they never have.) Second, so I could PUNCH THEM IN THE FACE.

REPEATEDLY.

If only it were as easy as mashing B. That stated, I had a badass idea for a game a while back. It would be about a supersoldat who goes around saving other women and girls from being stoned, buried alive, immolated, and so forth – chapter-based, see (and every chapter would be based on some real-world example of violence against women, maybe with a cut scene in memory of who you just ‘saved’.) If only I did game dev. I would call it Feminazi. (Maybe Rush Limbaugh could be a mini-boss.)

…Tada! A game game girls would play! That wasn’t so hard, was it? I’d play it, anyway. What the hell. >_<